70 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

hands at six-thirty. If I wanted to get up earlier in
the morning I put: the hands on. Perhaps this was
what Stanley had in mind when he heard Big Ben
strike as he lay dying and exclaimed at the strange-
ness, "So .that is Time!"

But on the lorry from Kailahun I still believed
that I could plan my journey by time-table. I
thought that we were going to Monrovia, the capital,
straight from Bolahun and that we would be there
within a fortnight; I would not have admitted the
possibility that in four weeks we should be in a place
I had never heard of, in the middle of the Republic,
watching an old skinny woman who had made light-
ning in her village carry water back on her head to
her fellow-prisoners in the horrible little gaol at
Tapee-Ta.

For one thing I hadn't the money for so extended
a journey. I had cashed the last of my credit at Free-
town and carried with me about twenty-five pounds
in shillings, sixpences and threepenny-bits. In a steel
moneybox with a padlock it made about half a man's
load. It was no good raking anything but silver into
the Republic, and I was to find curious objections
here and there to the silver money I had brought.
One tribe wouldn't look at money with Queen
Victoria's head on it; the news of her death had pene-
trated to the most unlikely places, to places where
I and my cousin were the first white people to be seen
in living memory, and the value of the coins, they
believed, had died with her. When we approached
the coast, among the Bassa tribe, we found that no-
body would accept the ordinary English silver-
stamped with a crown or acorns; they would only